Given that we have no “next-gen” on the PC, we miss out on the huge leaps forward that consoles get to have. Admittedly, we trade that excitement in for all manner of upsides, but I do miss feeling overwhelmed by a game. The last time it happened was in Planetside 2, when I was hovering over a tank column that was moving along a road. They were in single-file, jokingly maneuvering towards a very small base. As they crawled, the sun went down and I watched as the headlights clicked on. It was quietly glorious. What does this have to do with this new X-Rebirth trailer? I think you can guess.
I’m too nice and boring to say things like “I feel like I’m looking at the PC’s next generation”, because I don’t think that. What we are looking at is someone doing what they can with modern PC power. It’ll undoubtedly require a powerful one, but this is a game that revels in what we have, and doesn’t need to compromise.

It’s amusing that all this beauty is showing off factories. The scale of the X-Universe has always supported the mundane: glittering buildings, wonderful complexes, but with a boring purpose. Power, commerce. Rebirth has that, but at a scale that’s frankly showing off. The larger buildings are made up of smaller buildings, which are still huge. They have a purpose, with modules of stations hosting production parts. You can impact the economy by building or breaking these things. The best part is these space cities can be walked around, with you meeting the folk that are docked.

Watch.

My favourite part: the flowers crawling along the spokes of the Spice Farm. I want to fly beside them, snapping screenshots as I go, but that release date is still frustratingly open OMG IT’S OUT NOVEMBER 15TH!

Its a shame, because getting bigger and bigger ships and performing different roles in them was half the fun of the game. However, I’ll trust them on this if they think they can make a good game around it.

^This
I don’t see much point of creating a huge empire and earning loads of money if I can’t pilot the new ships I buy and get stuck with one of the ugliest ships in the X series. Hopefully they go into detail on how you can use drones to remote pilot other ships and capitals. I think that’s the video I really need to see to set my mind at ease.

capital ships are your vehicle of choice for all the many “big” tasks.
…
You can in fact even land on these beasts and get out of your playership to meet NPCs while watching the large ship move around in space FROM the deck of the ship!

You won’t be sitting in the cockpit and steer such a capital ship from the first person perspective anymore simply because that is boring. Steering huge and slowly-turning ships manually just doesnt make sense.

It sounds pretty cool to me to be honest. You get a feeling of ownership without the boring hassle.

I absolutely agree. So much so that I pretty much lost all interest in the franchise back when it was announced, and I’ve been playing in the X universe since day one. Yeah sure, freighters aren’t as sexy to operate as fighters, but I’m quite content to let my escort do exactly they were purchased to do while I manage my burgeoning trade empire from the bridge of my bloated Boron Dolphin.

For me, the ships were the juice and finding, attaining and flying them were an enormous part of the attraction. I’ll be looking elsewhere for my sci fi fix this time around. It’s a damned shame given this franchise’s pedigree.

Finding and taking new ships has always been the best part of the series, but do a lot of people actually spend significant time piloting the larger ships? My feeling was that once I’d tried one ship with a top speed of 10-15 whatevers, I’d tried them all. After a few exciting minutes spent trying to turn an M1 90 degrees, it was all autopilots and 10x speed. And leaving everything on 10x makes problems appear in the AI pathfinding and economy over time.

Right, seems to be a clever way to get around having to make 5 billion cockpits + ship internals. Where as before you just fly it with no cockpit, now you are themed having it as a drone. Clever honestly, over time they can probably add in more ships that have cockpits.

I’m actually fine if I can pilot other ships through drones. There won’t be cockpit but hey, they lost the cockpits since X3 though you could mod them in. As long as you can pilot the ships with the speed and steer stats.

Impression I got was that we’d be able to play most of the smaller scale ships, so fighters up to missile ships, but no carriers or other capital ships. Don’t see why a drone piloted ship can’t have a virtual cockpit – indeed, why wouldn’t you?

I dunno though. I was always more into the commercial side of the X Universe – I totally sucked as a fighter pilot.

Now I don’t actually mind, I can ignore the earlier date and believe that the 19th is the only date, but since you all over there usually whine about having later releases, I figured I had better whine about this one.

Nah don’t mind me, I’m just a tad cynical today. Looks absolutely lovely and for Ferengi Simulator Fans, it must be fap time now, but that video basically told me: Wait for mods, you probably won’t enjoy the basegame. And you won’t have the PC for it anyways.

I thought the same, but unless those graphics are placeholder, I doubt it’s hard on your PC. That NPC looked awful. Star Citizen (the same basic idea) supposedly works (on internal alphas) with a gtx 460, dual core CPU, and 4 GB RAM, and that’s without optimization.
Though those are probably minimums. Projected ideal is 8 GB+ ram and a 680.

The X games (or at least the X3 ones which are all I’ve played) have always been CPU rather than GPU bound. Pretty enough in IMO, but its the whole simulated environment that is the real draw, and as long as that works I’ll tolerate basic character models no problem.

I’ve kind of fallen out of the Rebirth loop, but as I understand it one of the major things its doing is replacing the old single threaded engine with a multi threaded one, which hopefully will mean that the old bottlenecks with large fleets will be at least eased. I’m a little worried for my poor old PC though, I don’t mind turning graphics options down but I truly hate having to limit my fleets.

I wonder how a small niche developer like Egosoft is able to implement such stunning graphics, time and again pushing the envelope for all space sims, while EVE, that receives subscription money from hundreds of thousands of people every month, remained largely the same for all these years? All CPP could muster is superficial walking in stations that does not have any purpose at all, and microscopic enhancements to models and textures…

The last time I was overwhelmed by a game was when I played Resident Evil 4 on the Gamecube. I am literally unable to perceive any further graphical enhancements. Art direction aside, every game since then looks exactly as good to me. It’s pretty great.

Well I have a hard time believing this isn’t at least partially as a result of Star Citizen’s fundraising success, but hey, at least Deep Silver can’t possibly made more exploitative DLC than Star Citizen!

I find all these persistent MMO’s annoying though (all meaning this, SC, and Elite). I would like a modern single player version of this type of game.
Persistent MMO means play time in the hundreds or thousands of hours will be expected, single player means a play time of tens or at mos hundreds of hours.

I did not say SC had anything to do with the series, I said I would be surprised if this isn’t coming out when it is as a result of the recent renewal of demand for space games demonstrated partially by SC.

X-Rebirth was originally due to be released in late 2012. Star Citizen only finished its Kickstarter in Nov 2012. Its release date was due purely to the development taking a year longer than anticipated.

Not only is X Rebirth single player, it is also the next in a series of space games going back to X: Beyond The Frontier back in 1999 or so and has never featured multi-player, nor could it possibly be copying Star Citizen especially since it was announced before said title, and also the game is made by Egosoft, Deep Silver is the publisher and has little to do with the development.

So basically without wanting to sound too condescending, you might want to a check a few facts before making a statement in future, although I imagine I am not the only one filling you in on this info right now and let’s face it, posting a questionable statement on an internet website isn’t exactly a serious matter so leave it at that.

But to give you a hint as to something you might well be worried about (based on previous games on the series, most recent being X3: Albion Prelude), the space flight mechanics and fighting controls could well prove to be somewhat lackluster, the game may well take hours to get in to without much in the way of a tutorial, it may well have an awful story with even worse voice acting, and it also may well end up taking hundreds of hours to build up an empire for the game to suddenly glitch out and you find your owned ships in other systems randomly ramming themselves into space stations. It will also most likely keep those terrible character models and the graphics will probably let you down in places that will certainly ruin your immersion. Also, you will almost 100% likely find yourself having to make goals for yourself, because, again going on this series’ past, if you choose to ignore the story (understandable) you had better think of something to do within the confines of the game mechanics.

Basically, the X series has always been a space sandbox of great potential but has always deserved a review score in the low 70s due to it being a jack of all trades kind of game. I may sound overly negative, but it has certainly been the case that Egosoft’s vision has always been somewhat ahead of what they are able to accomplish – but that is exactly why the series gets better with every installment. So therefore I’m hoping for Rebirth to finally smooth over lots of the old problems, but definitely taking it with a pinch of salt and keeping my hopes grounded!

I did not say SC had anything to do with the series, I said I would be surprised if this isn’t coming out when it is as a result of the recent renewal of demand for space games demonstrated partially by SC.

Additionally at no point on this page or in this video is it mentioned that the game is single player. Since both Elite: Dangerous and SC are multiplayer, I assumed when the video was talking about exploration, empires, and a supply/demand economy, it was in relation to multiplayer.

Perhaps you should read the comment you are insulting before you insult it.

X-Rebirth has been around long before Star Citizen appeared. It’s been in development for a long time. The X games are also probably the closest thing you can get to a single player MMO. You can spend hundreds of hours, and still not see everything.

Perhaps it is coming out now because they’ve finally got it to the point where they feel it is ready for release ?

Frankly, I could claim that SC and the new Elite are only coming out because EgoSoft have shown that space games are still viable with more justification than your claim that X Rebirth is being released now because of SC (and for the record, my claim would be silly as well).

@ Liudeius Maybe they have just reached the stage where they feel the game is ready. As you have been told already, the game has been under development for a long time. I don’t understand why you feel the need to add an element of conspiracy to that.

The reason is simple: oh right you don’t check any facts, it’s already mentioned that the game got delayed from the original release date due to they think it’s not ready (which is BEFORE Elite KS), I just feel I don’t need to repeat that information that’s already been posted…

Stop embarrassing yourself. Correlation != causation. How do YOU know that the game is being released because of SC/Elite and not because it’s just finished?

If you want to play it the way of the wounded sheep, the correct response from you would be, oh it appears I was wrong. Not to continue to assert your belief in a silly conspiracy. Egosoft have made nothing but space combat/trading games, since 1999. What has Space Citizen got to do with the release of their next game? Nothing.

The fact is, a game doesn’t just sit in development for 7 years for no reason. They probably had it partially done, and upon seeing the success of Star Citizen, decided it was time to release it because there was clearly a market for it.
And when the devs themselves are referencing Star Citizen’s success, it’s pretty likely that they took it into consideration when deciding the launch window (that being now rather than another few years in limbo).

Unbelievable! You’re either a very successful troll or extremely stubborn.

On the odd chance that you’re not trolling:

1. Egosoft has ~20 employees. They’re making the most massive game I know of. This isn’t some uninspired platformer or 2D shooter that can be made by 2 people in 3 months.
2. X3: Albion Prelude was developed during X-Rebirth’s development. By that same team of 20 people.
3. Both X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Prelude received updates during X-Rebirth’s development.
4. It makes no sense to abandon a 7-year project within 1 year of completion, waiting for some proof that there’s enough demand for it.
5. In regards to 4., the active modding community and the continued sales of the previous games in the series are more than enough proof that there is demand.
6. Egosoft has not made anything besides the X-series in well over a decade. I find it extremely unlikely that they might have put X-Rebirth in limbo to work on something else, within a year of completion no less, especially after announcing the project to their loyal fans.

If anything, Star Citizen may have inspired the team to work harder on the game, but that’s assuming they weren’t inspired enough already by all the people waiting expectantly for news of the game since well before SC was ever announced.

And in regards to being insulted, you really did deserve it, if for nothing else, then for initially making stupid presumptions about Deep Silver doing this or that, which shows you completely failed to do even a basic check of what you’re talking about before posting.

If there was Oculus Rift support, I’d park my ship near a space highway and just sit and watch for hours.

My biggest concern is with the dynamically generated content. Sure, I can talk to anyone I want and do missions for them, but it’ll be like Eve Online where there’s only two or three mission types and it gets boring after an hour. Hopefully they’ve included some kind of mission editor that is really easy for users to script their own stuff in.

Yes, according to a couple of postings on the forums, they are working on it but can’t promise anything yet.

It looks like whether Egosoft gets it in or someone outside hacks it in, there shouldn’t be too many problems with it. Everything they’ve shown so far (including the in-cockpit displays) seems to be modeled in 3d, so it shouldn’t have complications due to 2d objects. I don’t think they’ve shown how things like trade menus are rendered yet, though.

Edit: The games already have head tracking, which seems to be the most difficult part of Rift support, so cross your fingers.

Well, the prior X games had quite a few mission types, but wasn’t very smart about how it created them. Players could fetch an abandoned ship for its owner, hunt down a wanted fugitive, deploy enormous stations, bring in a shipment of critical supplies, protect convoys, map asteroids…a whole lot!

But that ship you need to find might require a bare minimum of 6 minutes to travel to and find, but you fail the mission if you can’t do it in 4. That wanted fugitive might be in a lightning fast scout ship and there’s literally no way for you to catch up to him before he escapes. You might be tasked to protect a convoy of space trucks, but, since the game engine knows you’re in a pretty boss ship and have a few dozen kills under your belt, the attacking force consists of bombers that can one-hit the convoy transports or corvettes and frigates that can melt them in a matter of moments. And the worst part is that the mission givers don’t provide you enough information for you to make a reasonable assessment of your own ability to complete the mission as many of the critical details are only given to you AFTER you accept the job.

If they can make the random generation less baffling, I feel you’d probably be happy enough with the variety of missions available.

did they fix the UI elements? I really disliked the ui for managing/building up your economy (universal traders, station supply setup) and some of the gameplay elements felt like poorly justified slowdown on player expansion (requirement for satellite network to get prices/supply that subsequently got destroyed by a Khaak invasion; the “level up” system for universal traders; the fact that even at SATA x1000 you still had to wait long periods when you played the economic game…

Also, will there still be massive amounts of “civilian ships” that put a drain on cpu without adding to the economy/gameplay (or will we at least be able to switch them off?)

Yes, they are suppose to have fixed it, has Rebirth is build from scratch, unlike all the previous game which has been build by adding and modding on the previous game asset since the original X: Beyond the Frontier.

That actually sounds appealing. I lost interest with the X series after I realised that every iteration was the same game taking place in small square rooms with different spaceboxes, with shinier graphics and more broken UI/AI.

When did they change over to this new cel-shaded look? I seem to remember the earlier previews looking more like the last games — smoother and glossier. I always liked the look of the ships in those games. It was one of the few things I did like, in what otherwise felt like an economic spreadsheet simulation with MMO levels of grinding. I don’t like this new look that much, but if the rest of the game works, I guess this “Borderlands in Space” look will work too.

It still looks like they’ve capped your ship speed at a very slow velocity, even in combat when you’re not touring the space station eye candy. That was one of the worst things about the series (IMO). It felt like you were flying through molasses, with zero feel of high speed like I-War or a few other space games have managed. Why would space ships fly that slowly? Well, it was because all the space sectors were the size of postage stamps, for one thing. I hope they’ve changed that part, at least.

Also, the enemy ship AI sucked in previous games. Just boring tail circling for the small stuff, and generic large ship combat where a battleship just handled like a ponderous fighter. It’s hard to tell from the trailer if that’s been improved. Combat isn’t the central focus of these X games, but you can’t avoid it (unless they’ve really changed the series!), and it should be fun. It shouldn’t be a slog through space with a slug of a ship, and enemies that aren’t fun to fight.

That said, and while the station interiors do look pretty barren, it’s about time someone did a full ship simulation where you can move around inside and interact with your crew. That’s actually about the only thing I’m interested in here. I’m cautiously optimistic.

ETA: One other thing I noticed was none of the in-cockpit views showed TrackIR support, unless I missed it. I hope that’s just an omission… or support will come later… and it’s not because TrackIR isn’t useful in combat. That would be a bad thing.

Well, that’s cool and all, but how fast does it fly (relative to other ships) when it’s fully upgraded for speed? I would expect the drones and any other small stuff you can control like fighters to be faster, but how fast are they (in the subjective sense, because scaling is always relative in a 3D game)?

In the last X3 version I played, once I upgraded to one of the fastest fighters (Mamba, I think?), it still felt like a pig of a ship. The maximum speeds were just too damned slow, compared to every other space game. And I think it was because the sectors were so small. Go any faster, and you’d be off the edge of the map. X3 has always had this scale problem. I miss the feeling of “big” space like I-War was able to pull off.

This looks absolutely amazing. On a different note, if this game can do all these things client-side, I don’t think anyone has any excuse for saying their calculations need to be done in the ‘cloud’, ala Simcity and I’m sure some other games out there too.

Just keep in mind they didn’t say how many FPS you’re likely to get when the universe is up and running. The older games could get really CPU bottlenecked to the point where people were modding out civilian ships to free up CPU cycles.

A company could very well decide to make a game backed by a simulation so complex that it really requires a supercomputer, or at least a large cluster of consumer-available computers. Thing is, they’re never gonna do that because it would be ridiculously expensive. Plus, simulations of that type are usually not real-time, and the complexity would hardly be visible to the player (i.e. faking the result of those calculations would probably be perceived as more convincing).

Mh they mentioned in the trailer that MY CREW will handle big ships for me , and all i could see was this small thing called “Albion”, so i wonder, will i be able to actually fly big ships myself, or are they just eyecandy and for my crew only?

Wow… I was already fairly excited for this game, but my anticipation meter just shot up to “ACHING”. Also weirdly, even as a US driver, piloting a spaceship from the left side feels sort of strange to me.

I can only speak for myself, but: I’ve never had a problem with offline mode. My account is installed on multiple PCs, so I keep them all “offline” to prevent conflicts; I can game from any of them while offline, or sign on and play that way. When I’m done, I go back offline (if I went online at all), and that’s that.

I have no Internet for a few weeks so I am using offline mode and its totally flawless. I also use offline mode over at my parents house which is equally flawless. So it is at Least remotely reliable but as with all things anecdotal the usefulness is limited.

I was offline for ten days over the last week or so due to modem failure and Steam offline mode kicked in without a squawk or whimper of protest. I was able to play the half dozen games I attempted with no trouble. I didn’t have any problems the last time I lost my connection either.

I think negative rumors of Steam’s offline mode precede it and people just assume that it doesn’t work without ever having tried it. Or they’re trying to play games that are exclusively online titles like MMOs and blame Steam for being unable to do so.

Thankfully, I have pretty reliable internet – one outage of a couple of days in the last six years, and one outage of a day or so because the ISP upgraded their equipment and my DSL modem no longer worked, flawless connections the rest of the time – but both times I tried to go into offline mode it failed miserably. And having no internet, I couldn’t google how to get it to work 8^(.

It may no longer be accurate, but make sure your non-internet accessing router is disconnected from your PC. If Steam detects a network connection, it’ll assume it should be able to go online. Pull out the plug so the router isn’t connected to the PC, and offline mode kicks in.

Banana_Republic, your assumptions are insulting, for me and for everybody else who had problem with that cursed system.

I’m not speaking about any “rumors”. My personal experience of Steam offline mode is that it completely failed me on my laptop while I was on vacation, flatly refusing to start. Actually I later found a wifi connection where I had internet access, and Steam still refused to start, so even the online mode is dodgy.

Even on my home PC, it works in a very flaky manner. The only way I can get it to work reliably is to put it manually in offline mode while I’m online, which defeast the purpose. I had a period without internet access and I seem to remember being happy having my GOG.com downloads handy because Steam misbehaved again.

I haven’t needed offline mode in the last 4-5 months so who knows, maybe they improved it. Knowing the rate at which Valve improve their service I wouldn’t bet on it though… they’re too busy adding cards, and meanwhile Steam is still the only app which takes ages to stop when I turn off my PC.

Funny enough the fact it’s only one ship appeals to me to be honest. If that means more work went into other aspects I’m happy. X games always felt overwhelming and this makes it sound abit less so.

Also I see some upset that it seems slow..again for me thats a plus..I’ve found many space sims way to quick for me so it will suit me. On a side note Star Citizen and Elite from what I;ve seen look slower than previous space combat games.

I don’t get how having multiple ships adds to being overwhelming. It just adds to variety, choices and fun. What’s the point of spending hundreds of hours earning millions or billions just to be restricted to upgrading one ship or not having the chance to fly what you bought. It kills all the fun.

I agree that it adds variety to have more ships and doesnt make the game more overwhelming. The X series games were a little overwhelming though. I always liked the idea of them but never really got into them. They felt kind of dead to me but this could just as easily have been my lack of understanding of how the world worked.

Having a wide variety of ships takes an effort to develop. If this effort was instead spent on easing the player into the game in an interesting way and explaining its systems and the impact he can have on them that would be a fair trade off for a lack in ship variety to me.

Thing is in the X2 to X3:AP games, you could fly any ship, not just the big ships. By any I mean the M5 small scout ships to the M4 and M4+ Interceptors to the M3 and M3+ Heavy Fighters, to M6 Corvettes, to M7 Frigates, M7M Missile Frigates, M8 Bombers, to capital ships like the M2 / M2+ Destroyers/Battleships to the M1 heavy Carriers. When you earn loads of money, you then go shopping to build up a fleet, mixing and choosing those ships that make up the fleet is quite a major part of the fun. I guess it’s like shopping for a new car or new cars IRL (but I don’t own a car so I wouldn’t know the feeling, but I guess it’s that)

The ship models, weapon loadouts, speed, steer stats are already modeled and implemented ingame, if you see the AI flying the ships in space anyways. I’m guessing you need to strap a camera in the ship to call it yours. I’m guessing a mod in future can easily do it if Egosoft doesn’t implement it.

I mentioned large ships because there are a range of smaller drones that you can fly remotely yourself.

You can still buy and use a large fleet. You can watch them flying where you ask them to fly. You can even dock and watch their progress from their deck. You just dont directly steer them. Your copliots do. They also apparently give you some pointers on how the game works.

Though I daresay I’d rather that Volition made a new Freespace game instead of those dire Saint’s Row games. So I think the more apt statement is that this might show the potential that FS3 would have had if Volition hadn’t started making those… games.

Yeah, don’t get fooled by the eye candy. If it’s anything like the last games in the series, then it’s a space economy simulator with a pretty face and a new engine for that face. If you aren’t attracted by the financial/strategy aspect, it may not be the game for you. This isn’t a new version of something like Freespace or Tie Fighter.

Unless they’re serious about that “reboot” thing… and I have my doubts… I don’t think they want to go head-to-head with Star Citizen or that new Elite thing. Egosoft has always had their own odd slant on this type of game. And it has always taken them a while to iron out the bugs. I’m interested, but I won’t buy it right away… based on past experience.

I loved X2 and the videos I watched of X1, they had this amazing feeling of discovering a new universe, wacky races and their customs, and while news events described in the BBS didn’t actually happen in the world most of the time, *I didn’t know that*, and it gave the feeling of a living universe.

X3 Terran Conflict and Albion Prelude lost the BBS and thus the lore tidbits, the ship cockpits, the station interiors, didn’t have the feeling of discovery due to the universe being basically the same, and the procedurally generated quests managed to feel more boring than your average MMO due to how they were presented. And the story was worse as well (even though X game series’ stories have always been corny as hell).

Hearing the trailer speak mostly about economic stuff worries me, I hope they didn’t make another dry economic simulator with a bad interface. If so I’ll just go play a 4x game or a Tycoon game instead.

Edit: I’ll add that the economics in X3: TC weren’t even particularly interesting compared to your average economic game. The challenge was mostly fighting the interface, piling up a lot of credits and finding a good trade route. Once you got over Ooh-ing and Aah-ing at all the little ships moving around, the variety of interesting factors to consider was way smaller than in, say, Railroad Tycoon.

Having said that I own all X games, but always felt them lacking somehow in their gameplay.
Oh well, I will buy the new X on day one anyhow. I just want to experience this.

The biggest critique I have is the fact that X uses the very limited sector based system, just like Space Citizen.
Nothing can beat the feeling of a game like Elite that uses virtually endless open space.
Elite D will be the only game that will create ingame the same psychological effect that real space has. That should not be underestimated.

I literally cant not buy this now. Well done, Egosoft. You’ve managed to get a cynical old hack like me, who really has a hard time loving your business simulators, to start throwing money at the screen and then licking it (Money AND screen).

This looks excellent, it shows EGOSOFT haven’t had there head in the ground like some developers who can’t get there heads out of it CCP being one them.
EGOSOFT are constantly creating better ideas, their games are created by what their fans have said and done, Ecosoft listen to the them, they go full blown all out they have to be one the most innovated and community interactive companies out there, all for the Space Game development industry. They listen, they see, and they DO!!
Great stuff Ecosoft can’t wait for the game release. :)

Ooooh this looks amazing. I don’t care for the “real economy equals real universe” bits as much, though it will no doubt be fun to play with the systems this entails with regards to PEW PEW FFFTBOOM. But I now desperately want to walk and fly through and around space cities.